Sometime around 1990
during our first talks
by a glass of wine,
just across the street
Rudolf Matys, the great bibliophile
and bibliosoph of Czech poetry
and its living 20th century memory,
told me the strange story of Turkish POWs
from the Korean War—those were the only ones
who withstood and survived undamaged
the Northern Korean version of MK-Ultra,
the utter isolation and sensory deprivation
except for a simple shake and mere human touch
from a commissar who took off for that occasion
his leather glove in addition to a smile.
All the others betrayed their countries
and went insane and soon they died
of what the brain couldn’t stand or take
—except for these hardened,
somehow never broken Turks.
And the secret of that feat?
Their cells were blank and void—
void of anything—but for a carpet
hanging on the wall, and unlike all
the others, only the Turks had their eye
trained and versed and read
in following the thread
that wove the carpet’s patterned plan,
thus preserving their mind whole, intact,
and not going amuck or berserk
into a chasm and chaos of no return.
And as poetry so in life and music
some souls can and do still follow
beauty’s and the order’s thread,
and grace in them still perseveres,
preserving the presence
both of mind and soul
as long as it can be meted out
to mortals in this world.
And isn’t illiteracy blind
to the splendor of the divine light
that holds the breath of life tethered
to the body’s limbs both ill and evil too?
November 2021
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